The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History
CLAUDINE COHEN, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. Translated by William Rodarmor with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xxxiv + 297. ISBN 0-226-11292-6. 19.00, $30.00 (hardback). DOI: 10.1017/S0007087403275397
The history of palaeontology has been explored many times, from many perspectives. It has been treated as the history of ideas in Martin Rudwick’s The Meaning of Fossils (Chicago, 1976); as the history of images in Rudwick’s Scenes from Deep Time (Chicago, 1992); as the history of shifting professional boundaries in Adrian Desmond’s Archetypes and Ancestors (Chicago, 1982); as the history of fieldwork in Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur (New York, 2000); and as the history of museum design in Ronald Rainger’s An Agenda for Antiquity (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1991). Claudine Cohen’s The Fate of the Mammoth, first published in 1994 and now available for the first time in English, attempts to weave all those approaches, and more, into a single work. It is, happily, a brilliant success.
Cohen nails her historiographic colours to the mast in her first sentence: ‘This is not a book about mammoths’ (p. xxvii). It is, instead, a book that uses the mammoth – the most perennially fascinating and widely recognized of all extinct mammals – as a lens through which to observe the history of palaeontology. Cohcn defines that history in the broadest possible terms; no significant aspect of humankind’s attempts to understand the mammoth goes unmentioned. Fieldwork and theory receive detailed attention but so do art, literature, myth, religion, taxonomy, museum displays and the social organization of science. Chronologically, the book ranges from antiquity to the early 1990s. Geographically, it encompasses events in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States.
The book is organized into four sections whose vague titles – ‘Images’, ‘Myths’, ‘Stories ‘ and ‘ Scenarios ‘ – mask a generally conventional structure. The single chapter in ‘Images’ sweeps from prehistory to the present, establishing the mammoth’s central place in the human imagination. The three chapters of ‘Myths’ carry the narrative from the Hellenistic era to the mid-eighteenth century, when mammoth hones were generally (though not exclusively) interpreted in the context of a worldwide Deluge. The four chapters of ‘Stories’ cover the years from roughly 1750 to the 1920s, showing how the mammoth was reinterpreted in light of changing ideas about the age of the Earth and the origin of species. The final section, ‘Scenarios’, covers twentieth-century ideas about the mammoth in four thematic chapters that focus on taxonomy, biogeography, genetics (including cloning) and extinction. all four sections are enhanced with a rich variety of well-reproduced illustrations, most of which will be new to all but the most dedicated student of mammoths. Comprehensive notes and bibliography, along with a serviceable index, complete the package. The translation, by William Rodarmor, reads smoothly and introduces only occasional infelicities. Making Richard Owen president of the ‘British Association of Leeds’, rather than of the British Association for the Advancement of Science when it met in Leeds (p. 128), is as serious as these minor problems get.
Many readers will find sections of The Fate of the Mammoth familiar. Cohen rounds up the usual suspects – Burnet, Buffon, Cuvier, Owen – and recounts oft-retold mammoth stories. Thomas Jefferson’s belief that mastodons might still roam the plains of western North America gets its due, as does the role of mammoth bones in the birth of prehistoric archaeology and the discovery of frozen mammoth carcasses in Siberia. Many of the larger threads she weaves together will also be familiar, individually, to many likely readers. The expansion of human antiquity in the 186Os, the battle over cladistic taxonomy in the 196Os and the ongoing debate over the causes of the Pleistocene mass extinction in North America have been examined, in greater detail, by other historians. Specialists in those areas may well disagree with Cohen’s interpretations on specific points, or her choices about what to omit and what to include. I myself would suggest that, in recounting the expansion of human antiquity, she overstates the contribution of Jacques Boucher de Perthes and understates those of the British geologists who, by verifying and endorsing his ideas in 1859, secured a fresh hearing for them within the scientific community.
Even experienced historians of science, however, are likely to find much in Cohen’s sweeping narrative that is, in fact, new to them, or that is presented and interpreted in intriguing news ways. Advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students – not only in the history and philosophy of science, but also in palaeontology and archaeology – will be especially well served by the book’s weaving together of threads that are usually treated separately. The Fate of the Mammoth is a rare achievement : a detailed study of a complex subject that sacrifices neither nuance nor clarity.
A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER
Southern Polytechnic State University
Copyright Cambridge University Press, Publishing Division Mar 2004